Sculpture, Sexuality and History: Encounters in Literature, Culture and the Arts from the Eighteenth Century to the Present

288 Pages·2019·4.06 MB·English

by  Jana Funke

Genders and Sexualities in History
Sculpture, Sexuality and History
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EDITED BY JANA FUNKE AND JEN GROVE
Genders and Sexualities in History
Series Editors
John Arnold
King’s College
University of Cambridge
Cambridge, UK
Sean Brady
Birkbeck College
University of London
London, UK
Joanna Bourke
Birkbeck College
University of London
London, UK
Palgrave Macmillan’s series, Genders and Sexualities in History, accom-
modates and fosters new approaches to historical research in the fields
of genders and sexualities. The series promotes world-class scholarship,
which concentrates upon the interconnected themes of genders, sexuali-
ties, religions/religiosity, civil society, politics and war.
Historical studies of gender and sexuality have, until recently, been
more or less disconnected fields. In recent years, historical analyses of
genders and sexualities have synthesised, creating new departures in his-
toriography. The additional connectedness of genders and sexualities
with questions of religion, religiosity, development of civil societies, poli-
tics and the contexts of war and conflict is reflective of the movements in
scholarship away from narrow history of science and scientific thought,
and history of legal processes approaches, that have dominated these
paradigms until recently. The series brings together scholarship from
Contemporary, Modern, Early Modern, Medieval, Classical and Non-
western History. The series provides a diachronic forum for scholarship
that incorporates new approaches to genders and sexualities in history.
More information about this series at
http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15000
Jana Funke · Jen Grove
Editors
Sculpture, Sexuality
and History
Encounters in Literature, Culture and the Arts from
the Eighteenth Century to the Present
Editors
Jana Funke Jen Grove
University of Exeter University of Exeter
Exeter, UK Exeter, UK
Genders and Sexualities in History
ISBN 978-3-319-95839-2 ISBN 978-3-319-95840-8 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95840-8
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018948660
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019
Chapters 8 and 10 are licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). For further details
see license information in the chapters.
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
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Cover credit: Thomas Rowlandson, ‘Exhibition “Stare” Case’ (1811). The Metropolitan
Museum of Art. The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1959
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
S e ’ P
erieS ditorS reface
Sculpture, Sexuality and History: Encounters in Literature, Culture and
the Arts from the Eighteenth Century to the Present, Jana Funke and Jen
Grove’s ground-breaking scholarly collection, addresses the sexual and
erotic appeal of sculpture from the early 1700s to the present. The orig-
inality of the book lies in the way all the authors interrogate questions
not only of eroticism but also of temporality. They argue that statues
are a useful lens through which to reflect on the uses of the past and
diverse fields of knowledge about history. The changing nature of the
sensory appeal of sculpture tells us a great deal about the shifting mean-
ings ascribed to sex, embodiment, and aesthetics. It is an interdiscipli-
nary book, embracing insights from art history, literature, film studies,
museum studies, classics, and queer theory. In common with all the
volumes in the ‘Gender and Sexualities in History’ series, Sculpture,
Sexuality and History is a multifaceted and meticulously-researched,
scholarly study. It is an innovative contribution to our understanding of
gender and sexuality in the past.
John Arnold
Sean Brady
Joanna Bourke
v
a
cknowledgementS
This volume originates in the Wellcome Trust-funded Desiring Statues:
Statuary, Sexuality and History conference, jointly organised by both
editors at the University of Exeter in April 2012. Jana and Jen would
like to thank all speakers and participants who contributed to the con-
ference. Some of the chapters collected in the present volume were first
delivered on this occasion and subsequently revised and rewritten. Other
chapters were commissioned later to cover a wider range of themes and
topics. The Desiring Statues conference was part of the Wellcome Trust-
funded Sexual Knowledge, Sexual History project, directed by Kate Fisher
and Rebecca Langlands, at the University of Exeter. We are enormously
grateful to Kate and Rebecca for their long-standing support of our
research and careers and for giving us the opportunity to work together
on the conference.
The writing and editing of the book was completed as part of the
Wellcome Trust-funded Rethinking Sexology project. We would like to
thank the Wellcome Trust for their generous support of our work and
the other Rethinking Sexology team members, especially Sarah Jones
and Ina Linge, for their encouragement. Over the years, we have ben-
efited greatly from conversations with other colleagues and friends at
the Centre for Medical History, the Department of English and Film,
and the Department of History at the University of Exeter. Claire Keyte,
in particular, has been an invaluable source of advice throughout our
time at Exeter. Beyond Exeter, the writing and editing of this book has
been shaped by productive conversations with Viccy Coltman, Laura
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Doan, Stefano Evangelista, Jennifer Ingleheart, Laura Marcus, Sebastian
Matzner, Daniel Orrells and many others. We are grateful to Ian Jenkins
for being an enthusiastic supporter of the project from the start. We
would like to express our gratitude to all of the authors who contributed
chapters to this volume. It has been a pleasure to work with them.
Thanks are also due to the series editors of the Genders and Sexualities
in History series, John H. Arnold, Joanna Bourke and Sean Brady,
and the editorial and copy-editing team at Palgrave, especially Carmel
Kennedy and Emily Russell.
On a personal note, Jana would like to thank her family—Annegret
Funke, Werner Funke, Nikolas Funke, Edith Fuchs, Sherri Lynn Foster,
Guffey and Monday—and her friends and colleagues Chiara Beccalossi,
Katey Coffey, Ben Davies, Sheetal Pillay, and Felicity Gee and Florian
Stadtler (#JFF). Jen would like to thank her family, friends and col-
leagues, Jan and Dan, the Grove-Whites, the Gallaghers, Wendy and
Paul, Jez and Rog, Wendy Benstead, Sanja, Abi, Karen, Alex, and, above
all, RH.
P S , S
raiSe for culpture exuality and
H
iStory
“This superb collection of learned interdisciplinary essays will intrigue
any reader interested in Western sculpture. It investigates sculpted and
sculptural intersections of temporality, sexuality, antiquity, and moder-
nity, emphasizing the power, diversity, and complexity of eroticized
receptions and gender dynamics and especially the possibilities of queer
response as engaged by artists and writers from Winckelmann to sexol-
ogy and psychoanalysis and beyond. The reader will come away deeply
informed about what sculpture can do—and what it can’t—in figuring
and provoking human desire.”
—Whitney Davis, George C. and Helen N. Pardee Professor,
University of California at Berkeley, USA
“We all know the uncanny feeling that sculptures can cause in us as we
perambulate around them in museums or reach out to touch their cold
surfaces. But what does it mean to conceive of the aesthetic encounter
with sculpture in terms of eros? Sculpture, Sexuality and History shows
that there is much more to this question than the myth of Pygmalion
and Galatea. The essays in this stimulating book offer a series of original
and sometimes surprising perspectives on the affective power of sculpture
as an artistic medium and its role in the history of sexuality.”
—Stefano Evangelista, Associate Professor, University of Oxford, UK
“Sculpture, Sexuality and History is as timely a publication as it is impor-
tant. The editors of this attractive and compelling volume bring new
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x PRAISE FOR SCULPTURE, SEXUALITY AND HISTORY
vigour to the study of the capacity of human beings to reinvent the body
as material artefact and to turn it into an object of art.”
—Ian Jenkins, Senior Curator, British Museum, UK
“The contributors of this volume brilliantly explore how sculpture—beau-
tiful, alluring, seductive, deceptive, dangerous and transgressive—has
become a solid embodiment of the past as well as the possibility of the
survival of the past in the present. This volume opens up new ways for
thinking about how sculpture is both a signifier of a specific time as well as
transcendent of the specific moment of its original manufacture and con-
sumption. Sculpture becomes the visual and material embodiment of our
relationship with the past. And that is why this volume really matters.”
—Daniel Orrells, Reader, King’s College London, UK